Monday, April 24, 2017

Tom Petty and Joe Walsh at Verizon Arena

In amber Aviators and varying stages of radiant purple formal attire, Tom Petty emerged and re-emerged into a spotlight between every Heartbreakers song you've ever cranked up to 11 on the radio dial, proving that it wasn't too soon, after all, to return to Little Rock and, as he put it, to "thank our friends for showing up for forty years." 13,551 friends, in this case.

Guitar techs for both Petty and opener Joe Walsh interchanged axes seamlessly after almost every tune, and staples like "Last Dance with Mary Jane" and "Life's Been Good" were delivered with loyalty to their no-frills original versions. Walsh interpolated Maurice Ravel's 1928 hit "Bolero" into the James Gang medley "The Bomber," and Petty made use of some serious spectacle, probably to the delight of any children in the audience/anyone who was stoned/anyone seated in the nosebleeds: a giant treasure chest (Are we meant to link that up with Petty's SiriusXM show?) and aerially suspended grids of balloons, lined up in four blocks of forty balloons each, swaying and re-grouping in formations like an overhead marching band.

Also, Tom Petty sang "I Won't Back Down" with nary a reference to Sam Smith (because he's too classy for that), and straight-up threw his harmonica into the crowd after a solo on "Walls."

“Blaze,” the Ethan Hawke feature film about Malvern native Blaze Foley starring Little Rock native Ben Dickey, is bound for the Sundance Film Festival in 2018 in the American drama category.

Little Rock native and Hendrix College graduate Ashlie Atkinson is to join the cast of the next Spike Lee film, “Black Klansman,” a biopic about a black detective in Colorado Springs, Colo., who climbed the ranks of the local Ku Klux Klan chapter.

Lawyers facing federal court sanctions for forum shopping a class action insurance case have brought in new legal guns from out of state to fight potential sanctions.

Twelve of the lawyers facing punishment by federal Judge P.K. Holmes in Fort Smith for moving a class action case against an insurance company out of his court to a state court where it was speedily settled have filed their argument against sanctions.

The lawyers facing disciplinary action by federal Judge P.K. Holmes in Fort Smith over their settlement of a class action lawsuit against the USAA insurance company have a new legal headache.

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